Levitation
Levitation
OUT of some upper-story window I was looking into a street of yellow-tinted houses,—a colonial street, old-fashioned, narrow, with palm-heads showing above its roofs of tile. There were no shadows; there was no sun,—only a grey soft light, as of early gloaming.
Suddenly I found myself falling from the window; and my heart gave one sickening leap of terror. But the distance from window to pavement proved to be much greater than I supposed,—so great that, in spite of my fear, I began to wonder. Still I kept falling, falling,—and still the dreaded shock did not come. Then the fear ceased, and a queer pleasure took its place;—for I discovered that I was not falling quickly, but only floating down. Moreover, I was floating feet foremost—must have turned in descending. At last I touched the stones—but very, very lightly, with only one foot; and instantly at that touch I went up again,—rose to the level of the eaves. People stopped to stare at me. I felt the exultation of power superhuman;—I felt for the moment as a god.
Then softly I began to sink; and the sight of faces, gathering below me, prompted a sudden resolve to fly down the street, over the heads of the gazers. Again like a bubble I rose, and, with the same impulse, I sailed in one grand curve to a distance that astounded me. I felt no wind;—I felt nothing but the joy of motion triumphant. Once more touching pavement, I soared at a bound for a thousand yards. Then, reaching the end of the street, I wheeled and came back by great swoops,—by long slow aerial leaps of surprising altitude. In the street there was dead silence: many people were looking; but nobody spoke. I wondered what they thought of my feat, and what they would say if they knew how easily the thing was done. By the merest chance I had found out how to do it; and the only reason why it seemed a feat was that no one else had ever attempted it. Instinctively I felt that to say anything about the accident, which had led to the discovery, would be imprudent. Then the real meaning of the strange hush in the street began to dawn upon me. I said to myself:—
"This silence is the Silence of Dreams;—I am quite well aware that this is a dream. I remember having dreamed the same dream before. But the discovery of this power is not a dream: it is a revelation! ... Now that I have learned how to fly, I can no more forget it than a swimmer can forget how to swim. To-morrow morning I shall astonish the people, by sailing over the roofs of the town."
Morning came; and I woke with the fixed resolve to fly out of the window. But no sooner had I risen from bed than the knowledge of physical relations returned, like a sensation forgotten, and compelled me to recognize the unwelcome truth that I had not made any discovery at all.
This was neither the first nor the last of such dreams; but it was particularly vivid, and I therefore selected it for narration as a good example of its class. I still fly occasionally,—sometimes over fields and streams,—sometimes through familiar streets; and the dream is invariably accompanied by remembrance of like dreams in the past, as well as by the conviction that I have really found out a secret, really acquired a new faculty. "This time, at all events," I say to myself, "it is impossible that I can be mistaken;—I know that I shall be able to fly after I awake. Many times before, in other dreams, I learned the secret only to forget it on awakening; but this time I am absolutely sure that I shall not forget." And the conviction actually stays with me until I rise from bed, when the physical effort at once reminds me of the formidable reality of gravitation.
The oddest part of this experience is the feeling of buoyancy. It is much like the feeling of floating,—of rising or sinking through tepid water, for example;—and there is no sense of real effort. It is a delight; yet it usually leaves something to be desired. I am a low flyer; I can proceed only like a pteromys or a flying-fish—and far less quickly: moreover, I must tread earth occasionally in order to obtain a fresh impulsion. I seldom rise to a height of more than twenty-five or thirty feet;—the greater part of the time I am merely skimming surfaces. Touching the ground only at intervals of several hundred yards is pleasant skimming; but I always feel, in a faint and watery way, the dead pull of the world beneath me.
Now the experience of most dream-flyers I find to be essentially like my own. I have met but one who claims superior powers: he says that he flies over mountains—goes sailing from peak to peak like a kite. All others whom I have questioned acknowledge that they fly low,—in long parabolic curves,—and this only by touching ground from time to time. Most of them also tell me that their flights usually begin with an imagined fall, or desperate leap; and no less than four say that the start is commonly taken from the top of a stairway.
For myriads of years humanity has thus been flying by night. How did the fancied motion, having so little in common with any experience of active life, become a universal experience of the life of sleep?
It may be that memory-impressions of certain kinds of aerial motion,—exultant experiences of leaping or swinging, for example,—are in dream-revival so magnified and prolonged as to create the illusion of flight. We know that in actual time the duration of most dreams is very brief. But in the half-life of sleep—(nightmare offering some startling exceptions)—there is scarcely more than a faint smouldering of consciousness by comparison with the quick flash and vivid thrill of active cerebration;—and time, to the dreaming brain, would seem to be magnified, somewhat as it must be relatively magnified to the feeble consciousness of an insect. Supposing that any memory of the sensation of falling, together with the memory of the concomitant fear, should be accidentally revived in sleep, the dream-prolongation of the sensation and the emotion—unchecked by the natural sequence of shock—might suffice to revive other and even pleasurable memories of airy motion. And these, again, might quicken other combinations of interrelated memories able to furnish all the incident and scenery of the long phantasmagoria.
But this hypothesis will not fully explain certain feelings and ideas of a character different from any experience of waking-hours,—the exultation of voluntary motion without exertion,—the pleasure of the utterly impossible,—the ghostly delight of imponderability. Neither can it serve to explain other dream-experiences of levitation which do not begin with the sensation of leaping or falling, and are seldom of a pleasurable kind. For example, it sometimes happens during nightmare that the dreamer, deprived of all power to move or speak, actually feels his body lifted into the air and floated away by the force of the horror within him. Again, there are dreams in which the dreamer has no physical being. I have thus found myself without any body,—a viewless and voiceless phantom, hovering upon a mountain-road in twilight time, and trying to frighten lonely folk by making small moaning noises. The sensation was of moving through the air by mere act of will: there was no touching of surfaces; and I seemed to glide always about a foot above the road.
Could the feeling of dream-flight be partly interpreted by organic memory of conditions of life more ancient than man,—life weighty, and winged, and flying heavily, a little above the ground?
Or might we suppose that some all-permeating Over-Soul, dormant in other time, wakens within the brain at rare moments of our sleep-life? The limited human consciousness has been beautifully compared to the visible solar spectrum, above and below which whole zones of colors invisible await the evolution of superior senses; and mystics aver that something of the ultra-violet or infra-red rays of the vaster Mind may be momentarily glimpsed in dreams. Certainly the Cosmic Life in each of us has been all things in all forms of space and time. Perhaps you would like to believe that it may bestir, in slumber, some vague sense-memory of things more ancient than the sun,—memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation, where the normal modes of voluntary motion would have been like the realization of our flying dreams?...